(Here’s an ultimate plan to grow your business rapidly in no time)
All those who’ve been reading those business magazines and blogs must have come across the term- ‘Growth Hacking’. But what does it mean? And why is it the most talked about topic in the market?
Well, we’re here to answer all those questions and give you instances how you can use ‘Growth Hacking’ to make your business grow. ‘Growth Hacking’ uses a combination of creativity, analytical thinking, experimentation and metrics tracking to sell products, gain exposure and encourage rapid growth within a company.
In other words, Growth Hacking is a new age marketing technique to drastically grow your business with limited resources. This works best for startups and small companies.
The process is not very old.
The term was first coined by Sean Ellis in 2010 when trying to come up with a new job description. Sean is known as the original growth hacker and has helped a lot of start ups achieve massive growth as a consultant (Dropbox). To advertise like any big company is a huge challenge. No early stage startup can match big companies advertising budgets. In order to grow your business growth hacking is the best thing to do!
But how to go about? From where to start? We’ve listed a couple of examples of small companies who’ve really succeed to grow their business through growth hacking.
Hotmail used the most underestimated part of an email- Email Signatures. Hotmail (now known as Outlook.com) added a signature line to every user’s outgoing email, inviting email recipients to get a free account. The line added was “ P.s I Love You. Get your free email at Hotmail”. That was all it took! The growth boomed as fast as 12 million users (or around 20% of the email market at the time) in 18 months!
Instagram is one of the most widely used social media application world wide. But it wasn’t as famous as it is now. By using simple growth hacking tricks it gained A LOT of popularity. They did nothing but provide what their users wanted. Following are the things they kept in mind:
- Having a great product with exactly the features users wanted
- Focusing on user experience and making it extremely easy to use
- Letting people try it out freely before launching, turning them into brand advocates
It might look like a very basic thing to do but within the first hour of launch, Instagram had 10,000 users, and it hasn’t stopped growing since!
Netflix started as a DVD rental company in late 90’s. As the company got more positive response, co-founder ‘Reed Harvesting’ wanted to expand the company. ‘Netflix’s USP was to let people watch what they wanted and whenever they wanted. Following are a couple of things they thought of to grow their business and it did wonders for them:
- Acquiring and streaming popular TV shows so people would subscribe to watch them
- Building a strong social media presence to connect with those who love entertainment
- Whenever your web series end, other starts streaming which leads to binge watching.
- And more recently, hiring the best talent to create great content that would encourage people to subscribe
The company now has more than 117 million streaming subscribers.
Shazam literally gained popularity through word of mouth! The concept of holding the phone close to the speaker to identify the song was extremely unique. It made other people look, and attracting their interest. The instant word of mouth worked, and the app now has been downloaded more than a billion times! Another such example is Paytm. It was one of the few applications in India to identify an unknown caller’s name.
Believe it or not, but even Facebook used growth hacking during its initial stage. Just like other companies, even Facebook didn’t do anything major. It just did what its users needed. Following are the techniques they used:
- Encouraging its users to add their contacts
- Sending out emails to those contacts if they were mentioned or tagged on Facebook photos or statuses
The notification emails intrigued people’s interest, and made them go to Facebook and sign up to see what had been said about them.
Trust us when we say that growth hacking is not rocket science. The key to expanding your business at the same rate may lie in just a couple of strategic choices. It can be anything ranging from deciding to leech off the success of another company ( YouTube and MySpace) or simply building mystique for your start-up by allowing only a few users in at a time ( Facebook and Pinterest).
You know what growth hacking is, just used it and grow your business within no time!
